Windows 8.1 crashes on Virtualbox since v5.0.4

[JPF_Sanders]

Hi,

Since updated to Virtualbox v5.0.4 my Windows 8.1 vm keeps crashing on boot.

If I revert to v5.0.2 the problem goes away.

I have tried the test build v5.0.5 rev 102780 and it crashes on that one too.

When it crashes it complains about:

Code: Select all

00:00:07.111355 emR3Debug: rc=VERR_NO_MEMORY
00:00:07.664650 ERROR [COM]: aRC=VBOX_E_IPRT_ERROR (0x80bb0005) aIID={7303a66d-433b-25a4-f9a8-fcadf87e0c2a} aComponent={DisplayWrap} aText={Could not take a screenshot (VERR_NO_MEMORY)}, preserve=false aResultDetail=0
00:00:08.112019 Changing the VM state from 'RUNNING' to 'GURU_MEDITATION'
00:00:08.112045 Console: Machine state changed to 'GuruMeditation'

I use Xubuntu 14.04.3 and I have 12GB of RAM
Linux 3.16.0-49-generic #65~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Wed Sep 9 10:03:23 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Anything I could do to workaround this?

Thanks.

[mpack]

VERR_NO_MEMORY means that VirtualBox can't allocate a large enough chunk of host RAM to satisfy the VM recipe. Try reducing the guest RAM to 2GB. Long term, try to find out what application is loading itself into the middle of your hosts address space and generally acting as a resource hog. This would be an application which is not a standard part of the host OS, and which loads late into startup process.

[JPF_Sanders]

Thanks for your reply mpack,

I have realized this is both a consequence of my own doing (as I limit the memory overcommit of the system to prevent it from ever swapping) and firefox 41 eating waaaay too much RAM.

What confused me is the fact that the crash happens when the VM is already half way through booting, not before it starts.

It comes as a surprise that the problem is RAM allocation after the fact, to me it would have seemed more logical that it failed before booting with a "cannot allocate enough RAM" message before the VM starts, rather than guru-meditation in the middle of the boot.

This coincided with me upgrading VBox to 5.0.4, I downgraded to 5.0.2 and it worked again (FF was not running at that point) hence why I thought it was related.

Thanks very much for your help.